Gunman's Rhapsody

by Robert B. Parker

  Gunman's Rhapsody

  Robert B. Parker

  The Barnes Noble Review

  Much of Robert B. Parker's fiction – his recent Spenser novel, Potshot, is a notable example – has straddled the boundary between two traditional forms: the private-eye novel and the Western. Parker's latest, the spare, evocative Gunman's Rhapsody, represents his first attempt at a pure, unadulterated Western, moving from Boston and environs to Tombstone, Arizona and focusing on one of Spenser's true spiritual forebears: Wyatt Earp.

  Gunman's Rhapsody begins in 1879. Wyatt, whose exploits have already found their way into the dime novels of the period, has just arrived in Tombstone, accompanied by several of his brothers and his common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock. The Tombstone of this era is a semi-lawless boomtown located in the heart of the silver mine district. It also serves as a kind of crossroads, a meeting place for some of the iconic figures of the Old West, figures such as Johnny Ringo, Bat Masterson, Ike Clanton, Katie Elder, and the drunken, slightly demented gunfighter, Doc Holliday.

  A single romantic encounter dominates this rambling, almost plotless narrative: Wyatt's discovery of the love of his life: beautiful showgirl Josie Marcus, who happens to be engaged to Johnny Behan, the shady, politically connected Sheriff of Tombstone. Wyatt's affair with Josie – which takes on an obsessive, almost mythical dimension – forms the central element in an interlocking series of personal rivalries and political enmities that will culminate in the gunfight at the OK Corral, and in its bloody, extended aftermath.

  Parker's clean elegant style and essentially romantic sensibility prove perfectly suited to the peculiar material of this novel. Without a false note or wasted word, Parker recreates the ambiance of the West, bringing its saloons, jails, and gambling halls and its endless, wide-open vistas, to immediate, palpable life. He brings that same effortless authority to bear in describing the lives and motivations of violent, hard-edged men who live – and sometimes die – according to highly developed codes of personal behavior. The result is a fascinating historical digression that illuminates a piece of the American past while simultaneously illuminating the central concerns of Parker's large, constantly evolving body of work. (Bill Sheehan)

  Robert B. Parker

  Gunman's Rhapsody

  Joan: So many towers, so little time

  Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

  And burned the topless towers of Ilium? Helen, make me immortal with a kiss…

  MARLOWE, Faust

  Prologue

  He already had a history by the time he first saw her, a reputation made in Kansas. He was already a figure of the dime novels, and he already half believed in the myth of the gunman that he was creating even as it created him. He wasn’t merely Virgil’s brother. He was the man who stood down Clay Allison in Dodge City.

  He’d come to Dodge by way of Ellsworth and Wichita from the buffalo camps where every day he shot two buffalo a minute with a breechloading.52-caliber Sharps rifle. Set the shooting stick, rest the Sharps, aim at one, almost any one, among the vast flood of ill-contrived animals and fire. The herd paid no attention to the down animal or to the gunshot. Fire again. Litter the Kansas prairie with the carcasses of the limitless buffalo. Cartridges cost a quarter. Buffalo hides sold for three dollars apiece, to be processed into rakish coats and warm robes for people who had never seen a buffalo, or into steam gaskets and traction belts that powered the machines of eastern industry. The skinners would make their cuts, tie the hide to a rope, turn the rope around a saddle horn, spur the horse and tear the hide from the carcass. Sometimes the cook would cut a tongue or a liver or a roast from the hump. But there were far too many to eat, and most of them were left to rot under the high Kansas sky. The stench of the rotting meat infested the plain and clung to the hunters and skinners, so that, in town, the whores would turn their heads away. It was the stench that finally drove him from it. He liked the gun work because he liked guns. They were balanced and complete and efficient and tightly integrated and purposeful. He liked shooting guns because he was good at it and because it was so complete an act. See something, aim at it, fire the gun, kill the something. There was always closure to a gun. And he didn’t mind the camps. He liked the company of other men who liked guns. He liked the rare meat and strong coffee and the rhythm of the day’s shooting. He liked the sense of space and possibility at night with the vast overlay of sky promising measureless likelihood. He didn’t mind the killing. It was part of the rhythm of life as he understood it. But he didn’t like the long, slow conflagration of death, its stench drifting invisibly from the degenerating corpses. So finally he sold the Sharps to Bat Masterson, wrapped his clothes and money in his bedroll, strapped the bedroll behind his saddle and rode his blue roan gelding northeast with an 1873 Army Colt stuck in his belt.

  He was an assistant city marshal in Dodge when he met Clay Allison on Front Street at the time of early evening when the sun has set but it’s still light and the air has a bluish tinge to it.

  “You know me?” Allison said.

  “Yes.”

  “You the fella shot Georgie Hoy?” Allison said.

  “Yes.”

  “You heeled?”

  He opened his coat and let Allison see the Colt for which the city had bought him a holster. Allison looked at the gun for a moment.

  “Next time I see you I’m going to kill you,” Allison said.

  “Maybe.”

  The two men stood close together in silence. He could almost feel the evening deepening.

  “You ain’t afraid of me much, are you?” Allison said.

  “Not much.”

  Allison nodded as if to himself.

  “You will be,” Allison said.

  Allison turned and started to walk away and stopped. Ten feet behind him and off to his right was a double-barreled, 10-gauge shotgun, the kind that Wells Fargo issued. Holding it steady on him with both hammers back was a young man who looked a lot like the city marshal he’d just braced.

  “My brother,” the city marshal said behind him. “Morgan.”

  Allison turned back and looked into the marshal’s Colt held straight out at shoulder level, pointed directly at his face.

  “I’ll take your gun,” the marshal said. “Give it back when you leave.”

  Allison stood motionless for a moment, looking at the marshal.

  “You ain’t got the stuff to face me even up?” Allison said.

  “No point to it when I don’t have to. Take the gun out really slow and put it on the ground.”

  Allison studied the marshal’s face beyond the bottomless eye of the gun barrel. There was nothing to see in it. The marshal’s gaze was as focused and blank as the Colt that he held steady on Allison’s face. Allison took the.45 out of his belt, holding it with his hands on the cylinder, and bent forward and placed it on the unpaved street between them. Then he straightened as slowly as he had bent forward, and smiled.

  “You don’t give a goddamn,” Allison said.

  The marshal kicked the Colt away from them over toward the boardwalk in front of the St. James Saloon. His brother picked it up.

  “You’d kill me and not mind it a little bit,” Allison said.

  Without comment the marshal walked over, took the gun from his brother, and stuck it in his belt. Allison nodded, smiling more broadly.

  “Hell, you wouldn’t mind all that much if I killed you,” Allison said.

  “How do you know?” he said.

  “Because you’re like me, is how I know,” Allison said. “Dying don’t mean shit to you, even if it’s you.”

  He told Allison he could get his gun back on the way out of town, but Allison left in the morning without it, so the marshal sold Allison’s
gun to a gunsmith and gave half the money to his brother. He never saw Clay Allison again, but he thought of him often, though he never spoke of it to his brothers or to Mattie, who lived with him and called herself his wife.

  In the winter of 1879, Dodge had lost its snap. Age thirty-one, he loaded Mattie and all they owned in a wagon, and went with two of his brothers and their women to Tombstone, Arizona, where the silver mines were.

  He was there only three days when a show came to town from San Francisco. He went to see it. When he got into his seat and the curtain went up, all he could look at was one girl in the chorus. It was her face most of all. Framed in thick black hair, bright with stage makeup, hot in the gaslights, it burned into his center self and stayed there unchanged by time for the rest of his life. The eyes were very big and dark. The nose was straight, the mouth was wide. Her body in its revealing costume was opulent, and he was not dismissive of it. But her face seemed to him like the face of a god dancing in the chorus of Pinafore on Wheels. He went backstage afterward, but it was the troupe’s last night in Tombstone and they were already striking the flimsy set and packing the shabby costumes. In the busyness of departure, he missed her and shrugged and left the theater. Her name was Josie Marcus. He would remember it. He didn’t know if he would ever see her again, but he would remember her name and if he did see her again, he would be ready. In the months that followed, he still thought about Clay Allison. He wondered how much alike they really were. A lot of people thought Clay was crazy. Clay was supposed to have cut someone’s head off in El Paso. He knew he wasn’t crazy, the way Clay was supposed to be. He knew he was more like Virgil, who simply went straight ahead, without hesitation, and did whatever had to be done, without comment. But what Allison had said was something to think about, and he went back to it quite often. As he settled into Tombstone, however, he thought about it less. More and more he thought about being ready for Josie Marcus. And after a while Clay Allison faded and he thought about Josie Marcus nearly all the time.

  One

  The road from the railhead in Benson ended with an uphill pull into Tombstone, and the horses were always lathered as they reached level ground and finished the trip on Allen Street in front of Wells Fargo. They were blowing hard when Bud Philpot tied the reins around the brake handle and climbed down to help the passengers out. Wyatt stayed up on the box holding the double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun that the company issued to all its messengers for the stage run. The intown guards were issued twelves. When the money box was on the ground, Wyatt climbed down after it and followed as Philpot carried it into the office. Since he’d hired on as a shotgun messenger there had been no holdups, and when there had been holdups, before he took the jo0b, they had always taken place on the road. Still, he saw little sense in being ready for no holdups, so he forced himself always to assume that one was about to happen.

  Wyatt rode the empty stage with Philpot on around to Sandy Bob’s barn on the corner of Third Street. Then he got down and walked a block down to Fremont, where he and his brothers had been building houses. There were four of the houses done, including the one he lived in with Mattie, and another one under way.

  Virgil was there with Allie, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Virgil was five years older and a little thicker than Wyatt, but they looked alike and people sometimes mistook Wyatt for his brother. He was always pleased when they did.

  “Thank God,” Mattie said when he came into the kitchen.

  She had on a high-necked dress and her hair was tight around her square face. Her cheekbones smudged with a red flush made her look a little feverish. Probably whiskey. Whiskey made her lively. Laudanum made her languid.

  “Safe at last,” he said.

  “Don’t laugh at me, Wyatt,” Mattie said. “You know about Victorio leaving the reservation.”

  “I heard,” Wyatt said. “But I didn’t see him on the road from Benson.”

  “Oh, leave her be, Wyatt, you know the Apaches are real,” Allie said. “People are coming in from Dragoon.”

  “That so, Virg?”

  Virgil nodded. He held his coffee cup in both hands, elbows on the table, so that he had only to dip his head forward to drink some.

  “Everybody in Tombstone ’s worried. There’s talk they’ll attack the town,” Mattie said.

  She spoke in a kind of singsong, like a girl telling someone her lesson.

  Wyatt broke the shotgun, took out the shells and put them in his pocket. He closed the shotgun and leaned its muzzle up against the door frame.

  “How many Apaches are out?” Wyatt said.

  “Clum says ’bout fifty.”

  “How many armed men we got in Tombstone?” Wyatt said.

  Virgil dipped his head forward and drank some coffee.

  “More ’n fifty,” he said.

  Wyatt nodded absently, looking past Mattie out the back window at the scrub growth and shaled gravel that spilled down the slope behind the house.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re home safe,” Mattie said and got up and walked to him and put her arms around him. He stood quietly while she did this. And when she put her face up he kissed her without much emphasis.

  “Go down the Oriental, Virg? Play a couple hands?”

  Virgil nodded. He put down his cup, stood up, took his hat off the table and put it on his head. Allie frowned at Virgil.

  “Maybe we’ll just come along,” Allie said. “Me and Mattie. See what the high life looks like.”

  “No,” Virgil said.

  “Why not?”

  “No place for ladies.”

  “Ladies?” Allie said. “When did we get to be ladies?”

  “Since you married us,” Wyatt said and opened the door.

  “I didn’t marry no ‘us,’” Allie said. “I married Virgil.”

  Virgil grinned at her and took hold of her nose and gave it a little wiggle.

  “And a goddamned good thing you did,” he said.

  Then he went out the door after Wyatt.

  They walked a block up to Allen Street. It was winter, and cold for the desert with the threat of snow making the air seem more like it had seemed in Illinois before a blizzard.

  “Kinda hard on Mattie,” Virgil said.

  “I know.”

  “She’s doing the best she can,” Virgil said.

  “So am I.”

  They walked along Allen Street. You could see the breath of the horses tied in front of the saloons. The early evening swirl of cowboys and miners moved hurriedly, wrapped in big coats, hunched against the cold.

  “She ain’t much,” Virgil said.

  “No,” Wyatt said, “she ain’t.”

  “Still, you took up with her.”

  “Yep.”

  Virgil put his left hand on Wyatt’s shoulder for a moment, then they pushed into the Oriental where it was warm and bright and noisy.

  Two

  He liked saloons . He liked the easy pace of them, the way the light filtered in through the swinging doors and profiled the dust motes hanging in the still air. In winter he liked the warmth from the coal stove and the mass of men. In summer he liked the way the half-dark room was cooler than the desert heat. He liked the smell of beer, and the card games, and the sense of oneness with the men who, like himself, liked saloons. He liked the lazy undercurrent of trouble that always murmured just below the surface of things.

  The only women who came to the saloons were whores. He liked the whores with their easy manner. Sometimes he went to a room with one. Sex aside, they seemed more like men to him, men who let things come to them and didn’t fret. There was comfort in a saloon, and possibility, and he liked to lounge at a table sipping coffee, and size up things as he rolled prospects around in his head. He always drank coffee, or root beer. Whiskey made him feel sick. One glass made him dizzy. Virgil had beer.

  “Mistuh Earp.”

  He knew the voice with its soft Georgia drawl slurring the r ’s. And as always when he heard the voice he felt a small
flicker of excitement. The voice was trouble.

  “John Henry,” he said without turning around.

  The speaker was very thin with ash-blond hair. He stepped around from behind him and hitched a chair and sat at the table. There was something citified about him, something in the graceful way he moved that seemed out of place in the boisterous saloon. He was holding a glass of whiskey.

  “Virgil,” he said.

  “Doc.”

  “You boys working or just enjoying the atmosphere?”

  “Enjoying,” Wyatt said.

  “How’s Mattie?” Doc said.

  His eyes were restless as he talked, always moving, looking at the room, looking at everyone, never settling on anything.

  Wyatt shrugged.

  “You still trailing Big-Nose Kate along?” Virgil said.

  Doc laughed.

  “A man will do a lot for a small dose of free poontang,” he said. “Look at your brother.”

  “That’s not Wyatt’s problem,” Virgil said.

  “No? So what is it? A weakness for hopheads?”

  Wyatt looked at Holliday silently, and for a moment Doc saw what Clay Allison had seen on the street in Dodge.

  “No offense, Wyatt. You know me. I’m a drunk. I say anything.”

  “No offense, Doc.”

  “But how come you stay with Mattie, Wyatt? Hell, you don’t even like her.”

  “We all got women,” Wyatt said.

  “And you don’t want to be the only one,” Doc said.

  “I brought her down here,” Wyatt said. “She wouldn’t get along well on her own.”

  Doc looked at Virgil.

  “You understand your brother?” he said.

  Virgil smiled slowly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I do.”

  Doc shrugged and shook his head. He went to drink and realized his glass was empty. He stood.

  “Be right back,” he said. “You boys want anything?”